Laws Are For The Little People

They treat client trust accounts as their personal piggy banks, facilitate multi-million-dollar frauds and drain retirement savings of the elderly.

While most lawyers caught stealing from their clients are reprimanded, suspended or disbarred by the profession's regulator, the vast majority avoid criminal charges, a Star investigation reveals.

The Star found that more than 230 lawyers sanctioned for criminal-like activity by the Law Society of Upper Canada in the last decade, stole, defrauded or diverted some $61 million held in trust funds for clients.
Fewer than one in five were charged criminally. Most avoided jail.

"I truly believe there are two laws -- a set of rules and regulations for lawyers and a different set for everyone else," said Richard Bikowski, who was fleeced out of $87,500 by now-disbarred Toronto lawyer Lawrence Burns.

Unlike the law societies in most other provinces, the Law Society of Upper Canada does not, as a rule, report suspected criminal acts by its members to police, no matter how much money lawyers steal.

That would be the same Law Society of Upper Canada that "voted 28 to 21 against the accreditation of Trinity Western University's proposed new law school in B.C."

Laws Are For The Little People - Small Dead Animals(external - login to view)

lawyers, your moral and intellectual superiors.

Sal

#2

Re: Laws Are For The Little People

May 9th, 2014

they don't get reported... regardless of the amount of money stolen...well that has to change.

Spade

+1

#3

Re: Laws Are For The Little People

May 9th, 2014

We'll put Rob on it.

Sal

+1

#4

Re: Laws Are For The Little People

May 9th, 2014

Quote: Originally Posted by Spade

We'll put Rob on it.

right after he finishes partying at the detox centre

Twila

#5

Re: Laws Are For The Little People

May 9th, 2014

There is a large portion of licensed accountants (CGA's CMA;s, etc) that steal from companies and are never reported, charged, or have their designation stripped.

It looks bad on the company that hired them. Can also cause clients of some companies to request their accounts be revisited which could cause those companies to go bankrupt.

White collar crime, eh?

Count_Lothian

#6

Re: Laws Are For The Little People

May 9th, 2014

I knew a Lawyer in the mid eighties that was dipping into trust funds.
He was really bad at it, and was dipping into this one to settle this one .
You get the picture, borrow form Peter to pay Paul.

And still he was using the trust funds to fund a somewhat lavish lifestyle.
Not actually lavish, but a cottage in muskoka , nice vacations, two kids in uni, a trophy wife , who was cheating on him...Ahem.

When the proverbial hit the fan he botched a suicide and ended up in a burn unit ,only to recover to end up being ruined and did some small time in a minimum security prison here in Ontario.

His wife told me that he could not even get that right, and if he did off himself she would never would have been able to collect the insurance .
She had her priorities as well. Ahem.

Slime or just idiocy. I think he did it all for something he never really had, that trophy wife.
He did everything for her, and she could have cared less.